Bad week

The Ja­mal Khashoggi af­fair has ex­posed the dark side of Saudi crown prince who al­most cer­tainly or­dered the cap­ture if not the mur­der of the Saudi jour­nal­ist in its Is­tan­bul con­sulate on Oc­to­ber 2. Many fêted the prince as a mod­ernising re­former, yet he has jailed rights cam­paign­ers and mer­ci­lessly at­tacked the Houthis of Ye­men, where famine looms on an un­prece­dented scale. The prince was ex­pected to ac­knowl­edge Khashoggi’s death as a re­sult of “an in­ter­ro­ga­tion that went wrong”. Saudi stocks have plunged. Many ex­ec­u­tives have pulled out of his forth­com­ing in­vest­ment con­fer­ence.